


To End All Wars

by lilacsigil



Category: Warehouse 13
Genre: 1920s, F/F, Warehouse 12
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-18
Updated: 2012-12-18
Packaged: 2017-11-21 10:58:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,890
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/596959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilacsigil/pseuds/lilacsigil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Paris, 1920. H.G. Wells is unexpectedly awoken to assist in a Warehouse emergency: new Caretaker Irene Frederic is missing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To End All Wars

**Author's Note:**

  * For [oliviacirce](https://archiveofourown.org/users/oliviacirce/gifts).



When H.G. opened her bleary eyes the first thing she saw was an enormous grey beard. Her entire body ached, but she forced herself focus on who had released her from her self-inflicted prison of bronze. 

She didn't recognise him until she saw his deep-set eyes, twinkling as brightly in a middle-aged face as they had in a young one. 

"Woolly! Why have you –" her knees gave a shameful wobble and Wolcott caught her with one strong arm.

"I'm sorry to wake you, H.G. It is most certainly not time. I need your help, however: one of our Caretakers is missing."

He helped H.G. to a chair covered with a drop sheet. As her vision cleared, she could see that they were in an apartment building, probably in Paris, to judge by the interior architecture, but it must have been locked up for a while. All the furniture was covered, and, apart from several large wooden crates, everything had a considerable layer of dust. She sat anyway and the flying dust made Woolly sneeze. 

"Woolly, how exactly do you lose a caretaker? And what do you mean, one of them? How can there be more than one?"

He recovered from his mighty sneeze, dabbing at his nose and eyes with a handkerchief. "H.G., let me bring you up to date. It's the year 1920. Europe has been devastated by the Great War, and the United States of America is rising as the next great power. The Regents decided to close Warehouse 12 and open Warehouse 13 in America."

"Oh." H.G. had never thought about the end of her Warehouse, or that she herself might witness it. When she had left, it seemed as if the world would keep grinding on in the same way forever, relentless and cruel. "But then won't Berenice die? The Caretaker is bonded to the Warehouse."

"Poor Berenice died eighteen years ago, when she happened to be on the island of Martinique during the eruption of a volcano so immense that it disrupted her connection to the Warehouse. Fortunately, she had made arrangements for Caturanga to take over if anything should happen to her. Perhaps she knew."

"My point stands, Woolly."

"Yes, Caturanga will die. He's been mostly asleep since 1914 when the decision was made to move the Warehouse, and Warehouse 12 began to slowly shut down. He was part of that decision, H.G., and we have all done our mourning."

"I haven't done any such thing."

Woolly raised his voice slightly, and H.G. stopped arguing in sheer surprise. "The world has changed. I did not awaken you to undo past decisions – I awakened you because you are the only agent I have right now, and we cannot finally close Warehouse 12 and open Warehouse 13 without the new Caretaker. And young Mrs Frederic, I'm afraid, has run off." 

H.G. got to her feet and stretched her limbs. She felt strange, as if she'd had a fever, the way she had felt being in someone else's body while time-travelling. She glanced downwards – no, this was definitely her. It must be a side-effect of the Bronzing. 

"Here, a photograph." 

The photograph was of a dark-skinned woman in her late twenties or early thirties, staring out of the portrait with a faint smile, as if in on some private joke. Her curly hair was piled on her head in an elaborate, rigid hairstyle, parted in the centre, no flirtatious ringlets or carefully disarrayed curls to be seen, no fancy comb or ribbon. The collar of her blouse was high, and H.G. would have thought her very proper, were it not for that quirk of her lips. The back of the photograph read "Irene Frederic, May 1919."

"Is Mrs Frederic a Warehouse agent? In what capacity?"

"Mrs Frederic was a journalist, a traveller of considerable experience, and she was our first recruit for the new Warehouse. Caturanga directed us to her when she had made passage to London to join the war effort and write about it – of course, we later realised that he was grooming his own successor. She's been working for us since 1915, gathering Artifacts wherever she could. And the Great War meant that there was a lot of misuse of Artifacts, on every side of this conflict."

"So, your runaway Mrs Frederic is smart, experienced, and knows how to use Artifacts if need be. No wonder you woke me, Woolly!" H.G. finally managed a smile, though the more she heard about this Great War the more her stomach twisted inside her, the bile that rose in her throat reminding her why she chose to be Bronzed in the first place. People couldn't change, not really. 

Woolly relaxed a little from his rigid position, with a tentative smile in return. It looked very odd, shaded as it was by his enormous grandfatherly beard. "Thank you. I know this is not when you wanted to be woken, but things are getting better, H.G., they truly are."

"I'll believe that when I see it." She left the apartment, taking a random wool coat from one of the hooks in the foyer as she went. She made careful note of the building – they must be in the 1st arrondisement, north of the Place Vendôme. There were small piles of slushy, dirty snow against the walls, and it was nearly midnight. Woolly must have been searching for this Mrs Frederic all evening until desperation drove him to H.G. She shook her head, slightly confused. Where were the other Warehouse agents? For that matter, what were they doing in Paris? The equipment from the Bronze Sector shouldn't be sitting in a pile of boxes in a dusty apartment, let alone the dangerous collection of the Bronzed. 

The city streets were as busy as H.G. remembered, and there was no evidence of this Great War Woolly had mentioned. H.G. remembered Paris as a great metropolis, but she kept seeing a great many more people from other nations than she ever had in one place before: there was a group of Japanese men in bowler hats; West Africans wearing fur coats in the cold; a group of singing Maori men sitting outside a bar. She heard English, Serbian, Amharic, Italian, four different kinds of Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, all within a few minutes of each other, and many more she couldn't begin to identify. The one thing that all these groups had in common was that the youngest and most fancily dressed were headed up the hill towards Montmartre. If H.G. happened to be a young Caretaker out in a fascinating place like this, she'd be out looking for the liveliest, most human place in the city: up the hill it was. 

As H.G. walked, she noticed that the rational dress movement she'd always subscribed to had absolutely won out over corsets and flowing skirts: many of the women wore dresses that barely covered their knees, and most were obviously not wearing corsets. There were even women dressed similarly to H.G., in suits, or in loose, flowing pants of fine wool that were instead cut on feminine lines to emphasise their shape. Something, then, had improved in the world! H.G. was startled to realise there was something about this new fashion that actually shocked her: short hair on women. It did look rather fabulous, H.G. thought as she passed a laughing group of Persian and French women, wearing their hair short and their bead necklaces long. Somewhere in the back of her mind she kept hearing her mother's voice, shocked at the young women's shorn heads. What a fuddy-duddy she was becoming, in so little time. She tried to picture Christina with short hair, but all she could imagine was Christina's hair as a toddler, fine and too soft to grow further. 

The spiral arrangement of the arrondisements had not changed, nor had the streets, and H.G. could have found Montmartre even if she hadn't had fashionable young things to follow there. Now that she was looking more closely, her eyes adjusting to the harsh electric light, there were occasional signs of damage to the buildings: the pockmarks of shelling here and there in stone walls, a few roofs and windows that were considerably newer than the buildings that held them. It was nothing like the devastation that Woolly had hinted at, but it made H.G. feel more anchored, seeing that time really had passed and taken its toll, rather than everyone dressing up as some kind of trick. The music was different, too, complex syncopated beats pouring out of the clubs. H.G.'s own musical education had been somewhat lacking due to her childhood habit of scaring genteel piano teachers, but tonight she could occasionally catch a piece of melody only to hear it thrown about from instrument to instrument, then a woman's voice singing deep emotion without words in yet another variation, and H.G. couldn't keep up. She focused on the bass line instead, and felt it throb through her feet, her hips involuntarily swinging as she walked, and nearly tripped over a man sitting on the ground.

"Oh, I'm terribly sorry," she told him, and he held out a tin cup. His face and one eye were heavily scarred, and if he was trying to talk, nothing more than a rough rasp came out. H.G. glanced down at the leg she had tripped on, to realise that it was wooden. The man was in a dirty khaki uniform, two medals pinned to his chest, and he rattled his cup impatiently. Two passing women, in beaded silk dresses so thin that they should be freezing, threw a coin his way, and he caught it against his leg, then glared at H.G. 

"I'm sorry," she said again, patting down her pockets in case there happened to be money there. She found a British shilling in the overcoat. Well, it might be worth something to him. She dropped it in the cup, and crouched down. "What happened to you?"

He pointed at his face and choked out, "Mustard gas," then gestured at his leg. "Machine gun."

H.G. backed away much faster than was polite. The man had been quite matter-of-fact about his war wounds, not thinking they needed further explanation, but to H.G. they were new horrors. Gas. Machine gun. No wonder Woolly had apologised for waking her: this time period worse than the one she had left behind. Mass, mechanised slaughter with machines, torturing men with vesicant gasses that she had only heard of under laboratory conditions…

"To peace!" yelled a man with a strong South African accent, sitting outside a café, raising his glass. 

"To peace!" replied everyone within earshot, raising their glasses in return, and drinking with a loud cheer. 

H.G. couldn't understand their delight. Surely, after having been through such a war, they would despair of peace and progress? Yet even the begging soldier with the tin cup had cheered, though he had no drink with which to toast. Still, she was here to do a job, then she could return to her long dreaming. Taking advantage of everyone's sudden good mood, she pulled out the photograph of Irene Frederic, and started to show it to people.

"I'm looking for my friend Irene – have you seen her? We were supposed to meet here." H.G. was well-practised at this, just as Woolly wasn't, and it didn't take long before a pair of Sapphists broke off their canoodling to identify the photograph.

"Irene, yes, I saw her about an hour ago," the older of the women said, pronouncing "Irene" in the French style.

"She had a new dress, white with glass beads," added the younger, shrugging off her fur wrap to show both a similar dress and her cleavage.

"Did she say where she was going?"

"I'll tell you for a kiss," the younger woman giggled, but the older glared at her. "Fine, no kiss for me. Irene said there were Americans playing at that new jazz club, Chez Suzanne. You know the Lapin Agile? Across from there."

H.G. did know the Lapin Agile from previous visits, at least, and thanked the couple with a kiss each, on the cheek so as not to annoy the older woman any further. 

Chez Suzanne was a shabby little place with peeling layers of paint indicating that it had been a bakery in days past, but tonight it was packed full of people and a thick haze of cigarette smoke. The complex beat of the music that was apparently called jazz thrummed lazily through H.G.; the band playing here had a call-and-response song going on involving much of the audience. She peered through the door but it was poorly lit and she couldn't see Irene Frederic. There were a lot of Americans at this club, especially Negroes, and a lot of drinking – many of the dancers had drinks in hand as they swung around the dance floor – but the thing that most caught H.G.'s eye was the dancing. It was a wild polka at ten times the speed, limbs flung out in all directions, men and women glued together and spinning apart, feet stomping and behinds thrust out, the fringes of dresses flying outwards like the spray from a shotgun. 

H.G. dove through the crowd and made it to the bar with only two kicks to the shin and an elbow jab to pay for it, and scrambled up to stand on the end of the bar. No-one paid the slightest bit of attention, a quality H.G. liked in drinking establishments. In the middle of the room was a group of Negro dockworkers in their rough denim trousers, but wearing their brightest scarves for the occasion. Irene Frederic, her hair cut short against her skull, was right there amongst them in her white beaded dress, dancing and laughing. Her hands swiftly crossed over her wide-apart knees in a dance that seemed to require either no partner or five: H.G. couldn't really tell. She was swiftly learning the shape of the music, though, seeing steps and rhythms from the tango she'd learned in Argentina winding their way through this faster beat. She took advantage of a solo from the trombonist to jump down from the bar, slide through the crowd and catch Irene's wrist. 

"May I cut in?" H.G. used her kempo training to spin Irene away from her friends and into her arms, leaning her backwards, tango-style. 

"You're much more attractive in the flesh." Irene slid one foot back for balance, and leaned even further, her fingertips brushing the floor. H.G. pulled her up, and led her into the steps of a swift Argentine tango, taking control of the beat to pull Irene against her, then pushing her to arm's length, never losing contact. Irene's dockworker friends loomed closer, looking concerned, but Irene waved them away. "So, Helena Wells, formerly a statue, did Wolcott send you to hunt me down? Tie me up and carry me over your shoulder to Warehouse 12?"

"Of course he did." They had reached a more congested area of floor, so H.G. dragged Irene up her own body until they were chest to chest and face to face. Irene leaned all her weight into the embrace so that the tips of her suede shoes dragged on the ground. "I'd offer to buy you a drink, but I don't have any money."

"Then I'll buy one for you." With a quick twist, Irene had reversed their hold and was leading. Her high heels clicked imperiously on the floor as she walked H.G. backwards to the bar. "Two Roses," she called, timing it perfectly as the song ended. 

The woman at the bar combined together vermouth, kirschwasser and a good slug of a red syrup H.G. couldn't quite see, and pushed the mismatched glasses across to them; Irene retrieved a banknote from under her skirt and shoved it towards to the bartender, who took it with a smile. Irene led them to a relatively quiet corner by the corner of the bar, where the music was still loud and the smoke thick, but no-one was likely to dance into them.

"To peace," Irene said and raised her glass, but H.G. did not. Irene drank anyway, with a small smile. 

H.G. drank, to find the drink more astringent than she would have thought due to the redcurrants flavouring the alcohol. "Why does everyone toast to peace?"

"Because we're sick of war. Still, to hear Wolcott go on, you'd think the League of Nations was going to put an end to it forever. What did your brother write? Oh yes, 'the war to end all wars.'"

"Charles writes by himself now?" H.G. hadn't ever thought what her brother might do without her to supply the ideas. Still, he had always had a fine turn of phrase. 

Irene raised an eyebrow. "You worked together on the science romances? Well, you are a woman of many talents. Your brother mostly writes polemics about the wonder of science these days, but he's really quite engaging. He's been promoting the League for years." H.G. must have let her confusion show, because Irene quickly explained, "The League of Nations is holding its first meeting tomorrow, and that's why Paris is so full of foreign guests. It's a sort of world government, nations coming together to negotiate instead of battle. There's been so many dead these last five years that I think without that hope, we'd all curl up and die."

"You don't seem the type."

"I'm not. I'm here for the long haul, as you know."

H.G. frowned. "Woolly said you'd run away."

"You call him Woolly?" Irene burst out laughing. "Of course, you must have known him when he was a silly young thing. And no, I'm not running anywhere. I'm thinking and observing."

"Observing whom?"

"Not who, what. Take my hand." 

Without waiting for permission, Irene put her hand around H.G.'s where she held the tumbler of pink liquor. H.G. gasped at the dry heat of Irene's touch and swayed as everything seemed to melt around her. Irene was there to support her, though, and when H.G.'s vision cleared, tiny purple points of light dotted the room. 

"What are those?" H.G. asked. Two men danced past together, kicking up their heels, and one of them was wearing a heavy gold ring with that same glow to it. He put his other hand on his partner's shoulder and H.G. noticed that he was missing three fingers and much of his hand.

"Those, my dear Helena, are Artifacts." 

"But there's so many!" She glanced over her shoulder and saw one of the empty bottles on display behind the bar was glowing, too. 

"Any kind of upheaval creates Artifacts – war, intellectual change, natural disasters, major social reform – because terrible and amazing things happen when human beings are desperate and driven. That man with the ring was wounded when he grabbed the end of an enemy rifle with his bare hands to protect his comrades. The ring the doctor cut off his mangled finger will protect the four people physically closest to you. That bottle was served by the bartender to three diplomats holding secret meetings while the Versailles Treaty was hammered out – it will let you communicate with anybody, no matter what languages you speak. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, more in France alone."

"They're so beautiful." H.G. couldn't stop staring.

"And yet my job is to lock them away. Now do you see why I am out here rather than sitting in Wolcott's dusty apartment with a bunch of statues? No offence."

"None taken." The purple lights were starting to fade, even though Irene's hand was still on H.G.'s, and H.G. could focus on Irene again. "You're a Warehouse agent, Mrs Frederic. You know what happens when those Artifacts get out into the world."

Irene sighed. "Indeed I do. And yet, there is a reason why these Artifacts stand out so much: they're still part of their original creators. They are in balance: their activation has been paid in pain or toil or the hard work of genius. Soon enough their creators will pass on, and then the Artifacts will have to find their own balance. Perhaps that ring will protect four people by killing a fifth; perhaps that bottle will allow temporary communication at the cost of permanent muteness. Wolcott wants to round up Artifacts immediately, but I will not."

"Woolly never wanted to use Artifacts, ever. Nor did Caturanga. There was a Warehouse agent in my time who tried to use one for the benefit of the British Empire, frustrated that we had so much potential for violence and domination but kept it locked up. Woolly and I managed to stop him, but not before he'd killed several people, including a good friend of mine."

Irene was shimmying slightly on the spot as if she wanted to stand still but the lure of the music was too strong. "These Artifacts belong with those who made them, like a child and its parent. But Artifacts outlive their creators and their strength is too great to wield without the passion, heroism and wisdom that goes into making one in the first place. I cannot trust just anyone with that much power."

H.G. danced with Irene, a simple step forwards and back. "You've seen plenty of misuse of Artifacts, I'm sure."

"That's not the only kind of power I mean. My husband was a stevedore in New York – those were some of his friends I danced with – drafted to do the same work for the war effort here in France. He was killed by German shelling, witnesses say, but no-one bothered to find his body. Just another Negro, his overseer said. And no-one else in this massive, pointless war would have cared in the slightest that he was a husband and a father and a poet." Her voice was hard, even as her hips moved to the music. "If such a little bit of importance goes to men's heads, what chance does the Warehouse have? We concentrate the power that others have sweated and bled to create, and then we can either help no-one or hurt everyone, as your patriotic friend wanted for the sake of his Empire."

H.G. put her glass down and pulled Irene close, her throat hot and dry with grief for Irene's loss, and anger at the lack of consequence for those who killed her husband and those who didn't care. "I think that's why you're the next Caretaker. The Warehouse chose a powerful woman with a suspicion of power."

"It chose…yes, I suppose it did choose me." Irene looked surprised but pleased at the thought. "Caturanga never wanted to use the Artifacts, not even to find more: he told me that they were created from the world but should be removed because they overbalance it."

Everything felt as if it was spinning away, except for Irene's warm body pressed against hers: H.G. couldn't understand how Irene could talk in one moment of her husband's violent death and in the next of Warehouse matters as if they were equally relevant. "There is no balance. None but what you take for yourself."

Irene smiled that faint, sardonic smile. "You're right. The Warehouse is part of the world, not apart from it. When those newly created Artifacts eventually make their way to us, we should be using them to protect other Artifacts and the Warehouse itself, as the Warehouses of old used to do. Warehouse 12 is more like the back rooms of a museum, everything catalogued and hidden away to gather dust. Orderly, safe and dead."

"Vincent Crowley did give us a rather nasty fright." H.G. felt compelled to defend Warehouse 12, even if she agreed with Irene in principle. 

"The tendency was there long before him, I think," Irene replied, looking a little past H.G. with that same thousand-year stare that H.G. associated with the Caretaker she had known, Berenice. "Like the British Empire at whose heart it lived, Warehouse 12 gathered treasures and kept them. Warehouse 13 wants to be different, to be part of the world, an active protector. I think I know how to do that now." She kissed H.G. on the cheek, then again on the lips, but H.G. felt as if her Irene's touch burned her. "Don't worry. I'll foxtrot all the way down the hill to Wolcott in the morning. Then we can go to farewell Caturanga and wake up Warehouse 13 for good. There's still thousands of shipments scattered across four continents that we need to locate and bring home, and there's so few Warehouse agents spread out over all that distance. You and the other Bronzed people spent the entire war in a cellar in the south of France, you know. Wolcott has only just re-located you."

"I can't stay," H.G. said, not knowing what else to say, the press of Irene's lips still a phantom heat on her own. 

"I'll see you again. The Warehouse is sure of it." 

Despite the cocktail, H.G. felt horribly sober and desperately aware of her surroundings, ever since Irene mentioned her husband's death. Paris. It had been a long time since she had been here, but not long enough. "You and your husband had children?"

"One. A little boy. He lives with my husband's mother."

"Aren't you afraid that you'll outlive him?" H.G. dragged the words out, but she didn't know whether she was warning Irene or attacking her.

"By choosing to be the Caretaker? No. To see him grow up would be a victory in itself, one that many mothers would sacrifice everything to gain. All I want is to make a better future for him."

H.G. pulled away from Irene as if she was burning hot. "Please. Please make that future for your son." 

She ran from the club, dashing so fast down the hill that her traitorous tears had no time to form. Her coat flew out behind her and her hair broke free of its neat twist, and she ran past the pockmarked buildings and the wounded beggars and the ugly drunks all the way back to Woolly.

Dropping the borrowed coat in the foyer, she stormed into the apartment, gasping for breath and thanking the pain in her chest for masking the pain in her heart. 

"You set me up, Woolly." 

Woolly woke up from his snooze on a drop-sheet covered armchair. "Mrs Frederic is staying, then?"

"You didn't tell me Irene was leaving behind a child!"

"Calm down," Woolly ordered, his voice deep and authoritative in a way that startled H.G. into silence. "I knew that you would want the Warehouse to go on, no matter what your personal feelings might be. Mrs Frederic is that future, and if your feelings are hurt and your grief re-born, well, we have all had to learn to cope with grief and move on."

"Your Elizabeth?" H.G. remembered Woolly's fiancée as a dumpy girl with a sharp gaze and excellent cataloguing skills. 

"She is still with us, thank God. But both my sons died in the war, and the elder of my daughters died nursing influenza patients. All while I was running around trying to safely transport an entire Warehouse in the middle of a war. I could have used Artifacts and stopped the whole thing, but my oath to Warehouse 12 would not allow that. We refused to act to the benefit of any side." He stroked his beard as if it comforted him, but his eyes were deep-set and sorrowful.

"Don't you want to give up? Don't you want to tear this place down and start again?" The tears were gone from H.G.'s eyes now, replaced only with burning anger. 

"No. I want to build a new world so that this never happens again. To end all wars."

H.G. shook her head. "My brother is an idiot and so are you. Only power creates change and you refuse to use it!"

"Caturanga refused, too."

"Then you're all fools and my hope, such as it is, is with Irene. Let me go, Woolly, please. This is not my place or time."

"I know," Woolly said, sadly, and opened a tall crate. It held the bronzing chamber from which she had emerged. 

H.G. almost cried then, with relief, and ran into the chamber. There was nothing here for her, not yet.

Woolly fiddled with the brass lever of the bronzing chamber. "I'm sorry that I woke you so soon."

H.G. smiled back at him, finally. "Don't be. A slight hope is a greatly different to none."

He pulled the lever and, after a moment of intense but familiar pain, H.G. thankfully returned to that quiet place where even her own thoughts couldn't hurt her. Her heartbeat throbbed – one day, one day, one day – and stopped. The future awaited, again.


End file.
